(You know, that Angela Bassett finds on the video camera that Ellie takes on the pod.) This isn't just a neat hint that she didn't hallucinate the whole thing, and that the US government (naturally) covered it up; this is exactly how you'd transmit the next stage of the message - tightly compressed, no redundancy, and therefore resembling nothing so much as white noise.Yeah, I know, it's just a film, in fact humanity won't be saved by spooky radio messages from outer space. But it's one of those few occasions when a detailed knowledge of compression theory is actually useful in the real world, so I thought it was worth pointing out...
Nice review on technical accuracy: www.filmscouts.com/reviews/contactb.html
Back to Need To Know: www.spesh.com/cgi-bin/now